


Quarantine Protocol

by newsbypostcard (orphan_account)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-21
Updated: 2013-07-21
Packaged: 2017-12-20 21:14:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/891938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Kirk awakens to find himself locked inside a room in the Starfleet clinic, electricity failing, food rotting around him -- and something is throwing its fists against his door.</p><p>Soon Jim learns about the implications of having been brought back to life, of word getting out about the regenerative properties of the blood of Augmented humans. As Jim had lain in his coma, locked away high in Starfleet's tower, scientists had brought the Augments out from cryogenic storage so their blood could be studied -- an endeavor to cure the most prolific diseases of the 23rd century. But so eager were researchers to cure humanity that they didn’t grasp the unfathomable consequences of bringing 72 Augments — and the propagandic history of the Eugenics Wars — into the public eye…</p><p>Zombie!pocalypse AU set after Star Trek: Into Darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quarantine Protocol

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for language, violence, character death, description of destruction to cityscape ... you know, the usual zombiepocalypse fare.
> 
> Based chiefly off [this photoset](http://acciomccoy.tumblr.com/post/54631908851/star-trek-xi-au-zombie-apocalypse-au-bones-run), although see also [this one](http://henrycaviil.tumblr.com/post/51346535078/star-trek-au-brink-of-zombie-apocalypse-a-group) and [this one](http://acciomccoy.tumblr.com/post/54784661928/star-trek-xi-au-zombie-apocalypse-au-its-all). None of these says anything necessarily about my own plot, but how visceral the images!
> 
> This fic takes place in 2259 in the rebooted Trek verse. However, apart from the specific causes as to how the zombiepocalypse came about, almost all zombsplanations are drawn from the Walking Dead verse. The first chapter also draws extremely heavily from how the Walking Dead series opens. In later chapters there may also be a couple Walking Dead characters, adapted for the Trek verse; but the emphasis remains on Trek. The fic will make sense if you aren't familiar with Walking Dead, but may make significantly less sense if you aren't familiar with the background of the Augments in the Trek verse.
> 
> No hard pairings, but decided loyalties.
> 
> [A playlist](http://8tracks.com/newsbypostcard/quarantine-protocol), if you like.
> 
> More characters, warnings, descriptions will be added as more chapters are. Spoilers, you understand.

He realized his fingernails were resting against the palm of his hand.

So that was that, then. Consciousness.

A squeeze. They pressed in. A shock of pain jolted up his forearm with the tension of his tendons. Something sharp was pierced into his skin. 

He tried to lift his other arm to pull it out, but the effort was impossible. He settled for moving the offending arm back and forth against the bed -- he was on a bed -- and realized there was a line stemming from it. 

Was this a hospital? He’d heard about intravenous lines in old books, pre-hypo tech that stuck into your vein and released fluids over long periods of time. He couldn’t think what else it might be.

But that didn’t sound right. Bones would faint at the mere _thought_ of medicine that old.

\-----

Red flashed from time to time on the other side of closed eyelids; the only sounds were the telltale indications of dying electricity. Shorting lights. Feeble, wailing beeps from machines trying to function.

He peeled his eyes open with the sickly sensation of breaking crust. Ceiling tiles stared back.

Jim turned his head, engaged his neck, looked around the room. Everything was intact, but wrong somehow. Greeting cards were splayed around the room, corners peeling in the heat; foodstuffs rotted in bowls and baskets.

The lights went staccato, and _everything hurt_.

His head fell back against the pillows, vision clouding.

\-----

It had taken a day, but he was on his feet. Again. After having overcome that small issue of his legs collapsing out from under him the first time.

And the second time.

No matter. He was standing now. He hoped never to have to remove catheters from his body again and was gripping concertedly onto the nearest available surface at all times, but he was standing. And even walking a little.

Okay. Shuffling. But still progress.

He ripped the IV out of his arm and immediately yelped in surprise at how much that goddamn thing _hurt_. His throat seared badly with the effort of the shout, and he doubled over with the force of a whooping, dehydrated cough for way too goddamn long. With what felt like tremendous effort, he straightened up again and shuffled his way over to the nearest food basket.

Fruit, fruit, and more fruit. Whose idea was this? The rotting was unreal. He narrowly avoided retching. He’d obviously been out for a long goddamn time -- and people had decided to send him perishable goods?

More to the point -- why were they still here? Why were they still here _and perishing_?

Jim continued his shuffle around the room. Still fruit. One basket of wine and molded cheese. Jim wrinkled his nose and again cursed the impracticality of his well-wishers. _Sorry about dying -- please enjoy delicate French foods upon your revival._

But then, he remarked, beholding another basket with disbelieving eyes, not all of them were idiots -- one genius had sent him chocolate bars.

Now that was more like it.

They were melted as shit and they didn’t help his itchy throat, but by god, they might’ve been the best things Jim had ever tasted. He ate three in succession and licked the chocolate off his fingers in what was surely an inadvisable move. Then he closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, allowing the sugar to soak into his system.

In five minutes, he was already feeling more robust. He glanced sidelong at the door out into the hallway, seeing for the first time the lock had been melted out, totally obliterated by a concentrated phaser blast. He didn’t think he’d be able to open the door with any degree of ease.

_What the fuck had happened here?_

He hazarded the few steps over to the door and tried the doorknob anyway. As suspected -- pretty firmly melted in. His strength was still abysmal and his throat was still killing him, so he thought he’d give it more time before he found a more solid solution to the problem of getting the hell out of this room.

He dragged his feet over to the bathroom, finally without need of physical support, and drank greedily from the tap for solid minutes, stopping only when the sloshing fullness of his stomach suggested he should. Then he eventually made his way back out into the room and opted to get something more closely resembling nutrients into his system. Jim returned to the cheese basket and grabbed a box of apparently unspoiled “flax seed wafers” off the top -- oh, for crying out loud, who sends this shit? -- and opened it clumsily, shoving a handful unceremoniously into his mouth.

He looked around the room as he ate, taking in the details. He figured he was in the Starfleet clinic, standard issue room. The blinds were closed and the windows were far, but a glance outside would prove it. The architecture was undeniable, and he doubted his crew would’ve bothered to bring him back to life anywhere else, even if it meant a hundred court martials.

He grabbed the greeting card nearest to him and read it while he chewed.

_Attn: Jim Kirk_  
 _**Feel better soon!** _  
_This letter serves as ample and sufficient notice that your demotion to lieutenant commander is confirmed effective Stardate 2259.134._

He huffed and grabbed another.

_Jim -- Congratulations on being an unfathomable medical miracle. I’m sure you’ll milk the hell out of it._

Jesus H. Christ. Did nobody have anything to say about his unparalleled heroism?

He grabbed a third.

_Call me when you can get it up._

Well for f--

Jim froze.  
Distantly -- a clatter.

He struggled to hear over the pounding of his own heart and the ongoing flicker of the dying lights. Hastily, he put the wafers on the table and crept his way over to the door, pressing an ear against it.

Someone was out there.

It sounded like they were just as weak as Jim was, the sound of slow, dragging movements punctuated by subdued groans. Metal instruments kept clanging together, and Jim guessed the hall was littered with abandoned medical equipment that his companion was stumbling over as they moved through the hall. 

The full impact of the realization that Jim had been _sealed into an apparently abandoned Starfleet clinic_ hit him all at once, and he wondered if he was actually still terminally ill, somehow, if this was quarantine, if this other person had managed to fight their way out of their own room prison.

“Hey!” he shouted through the door, his voice surprising him with its clarity. He batted the heel of his hand against the door with as much exertion as he thought was wise. “Hey, is someone out there?”

A prolonged moan -- slightly louder as it moved toward the sound of his voice.

“Hey! Do you know what’s happening? Can you get me out of here?”

Jim started and stumbled backward with the first smack against the door. “Whoa,” he breathed. “Are you all right? Are you injured?”

All Jim could do was stare at the door as the first blow was followed by another, and another, moans intensifying, noise without the context of words. He stepped slowly backwards as he realized that there was no force behind the effort; instead, it sounded as though they were just throwing their fists against the door without any coordination or strategy, hitting it at random points and waiting for it to give.

Every one of Jim’s instincts screamed that something was horribly wrong with this situation.

He looked frantically around the room, adrenaline pumping through his system and allowing him to force limber movements through his stiff limbs. He didn’t see anything around him except foodstuffs and cards, and the occasional spare pillow and hospital gown -- all totally useless for defending himself.

He fucking loved his friends. Why not bring him back to life and then leave him abandoned and defenseless in the event of what he was becoming increasingly certain was total quarantine?

Wait -- no.  
They wouldn’t do that.  
 _None of them would ever do that._

The pounding carried on against the door behind him, unchanging in its lazy urgency. Jim turned the bed frantically apart, looking for something someone might have left him, before he opened drawers and overturned every gift basket onto the floor, revealing nothing but the sickly slaps of rotting fruit as they connected with the floor. Then, after carding a nervous hand through his hair, he gingerly lowered himself to the floor and checked under the bed.

There, strapped to the underside, was a phaser -- and a note.

He snatched it out from its hiding place with some difficulty, the haphazard tying job causing his uncoordinated fingers some difficulty; but he was pleased to see the phaser was almost fully charged as he straightened himself back up, sending a glance at the door as he planted himself on the bed and forced himself to take a steady breath.

Bones’ untidy scrawl was made worse by hurriedness, but Jim was pretty sure he was reading the note correctly:

_Level 10. Aim for the head. Use sparingly._  
 _WHATEVER YOU DO -- DON’T GET BIT._

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jim asked the note. Level 10 would bore a hole through anyone’s head in an instant.

The erratic pounding at the door continued, punctuated with ongoing moans.

To be fair to Bones, though, he didn’t actually know that what was on the other side was humanoid.

 _Don’t get bit_ … ?  
Christ.

Jim waited another minute, willing his heart rate down, making himself think through all the parameters of the scenario. Then, realizing he was not likely in any immediate danger given that the -- person? beast? -- was making no progress or changes in pattern, he got back up and went over to the window.

He took another steadying breath, then commanded: “Computer, open blinds.”

Nothing happened.

“Computer?”

The telltale sound of the computer coming to attention never came.

Jim cursed and lifted the blinder himself, resistance slight but not as heavy as he’d expected; but then he let go just as quickly, stepping backward into the room as they slapped against the windowsill.

Bodies absolutely fucking _littered_ the clinic’s grounds.

Somewhat involuntarily, Jim sat down on the bed and set shaking hands over his mouth.

He took a minute to steady himself before he hazarded another look outside. One hand clenched at the windowsill for support while he peered around, trying to take in as much information as he could without passing out.

He counted forty-three dead, just within sight of his window. Many of them had already clearly been decomposing for days, appendages and abdomens bloating under the heat of the sun. Blood was spattered absolutely everywhere, and Jim noted that several of the bodies -- most of them, in fact -- appeared to have been killed with graphic blows to the head.

These were murders -- almost all of them.

“Fuck.”

The pounding on the door continued behind him.

Jim set the blinder down hesitantly and turned to stare at the door, not clear on his next move. He wondered if whatever was on the other side had been seriously injured, too, was trying to get help and that Jim was just standing there failing to help them. But his instincts still flagged, reminding him that the figure pounding on the door had failed to offer him a coherent reply, and he remained deeply reluctant to open that door just yet.

Where the hell was everyone else?

His gaze snagged on the note Bones had left him.

_Aim for the head._

Something was very deeply fucking wrong with this picture.

Jim slapped himself in the face. “Wake up.”

To his dismay, nothing changed. The pounding continued on.

Against his emphatic preference, Jim took another glance outside; noticed the distant chaos of vehicles in the parking lot; and figured he’d better try and find another healthy, living soul before he died in here.

Fortunately, he was nothing if not aces at survival strategies.

Within an hour, he’d rigged a pillowcase into a satchel and thrown as much unperished food into it as he could find. He’d opted to clean himself in the sink given that the shower was likewise not responding to commands, and he tied two clean hospital gowns together to fashion something more closely resembling clothing. By the time he slung the satchel over his shoulder and approached the door with his phaser in hand, whatever was on the other side of the door had seemed to have either died or moved on, and Jim was left in eerie silence as he stared the door down.

At last, with a great shuddering breath, Jim pulled the trigger on the phaser and aimed it at the lock until he was able to shove the door open.

Jim suddenly wished for the ability to travel back in time to make a different decision.

The stench of rotting flesh totally overwhelmed his senses, and Jim was forced to take a step back into his room in a futile attempt to breathe cleaner air before he lost what little was in his stomach. When he was again confident in the steadiness of his hands he forced himself back out, leading with his phaser, and was met with the sight of bodies in various stages of emaciation and decomposition littering the hallway, along with haphazardly abandoned medical equipment and what looked suspiciously like military-grade weaponry.

Many of the dead wore Starfleet uniforms, Jim noted, while others wore medical uniforms; others still looked to be wearing pedestrian clothing. As he made his way through the hall, eyes watering with the force of the smell, he registered that a distinct few were also military, the shells of their armor burned straight through, guts and brains tumbling out onto the floor both.

There had been a total indiscriminate slaughter at Starfleet. Civilians were inexplicably in the clinic; the military had been called in; and then _everyone_ had been targeted in … whatever this was.

None of this made any fucking sense.

Jim reached the end of the adjacent corridor to discover that the elevator was, predictably, down. Lights continued to flicker on and off around him unnecessarily, mocking the sunlight streaming boldly in through the windows. He looked around for the door to the stairwell, locating it quickly, and opted to remove the wrist from his nose to try to push it open.

Completely blocked. Would not budge an inch.

Some asshole really didn’t want anyone to get out of here alive.

A groan to his left forced his attention away from the door. His phaser snapped to the source of the noise, and Jim’s grip stiffened as he regarded the figure staggering toward him.

It looked basically human -- but at the same time, it was all wrong. Its motions were too stiff and unyielding to be properly human; an air of vacancy deadened its facial expression. It was as though it was operating on limited functionality, life-support and propulsion systems the only things on. Even then, they too barely seemed in operation, forcing this creature to a default state of dragging feet, limp arms, incoherent vocalizations.

Jim tried to steady his breathing and clicked the setting on the phaser down to stun. “Can you speak?” he asked. “Do you understand me?”

The figure gave no indication that it had heard Jim at all, limping steadily on toward him with an impossible crick in its neck, blood stains around its mouth. Its eyes seemed to stare without seeing, and Jim felt his back hit the wall behind him.

“If you can hear me -- stop. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will defend myself.”

Still the figure stalked toward him, and Jim pursed his lips and fired a shot. Pulses ran through the figure and it fell easily to the floor, collapsing as dead weight and failing to put its arms out to support itself as it went down.

Jim blinked and slowly lowered his weapon. “Okay,” he muttered to himself. “Stun works.”

But as he crept slowly toward the creature, he saw that he’d spoken too soon; almost immediately, the figure was stirring, propping itself up, and struggling its way back to a standing position.

“Fuck. No.” He took a step backward as the figure groaned, and Jim evaluated his options. “Stun does _not_ work.” He gave a growl deep in his throat and pushed past the figure, making his way swiftly back down the hall to see if there was another stairwell. He glanced behind him to see that the figure was watching his retreat and turning to follow; and Jim took solace in the realization that he could, at least, outrun the fucker if he had to.

He turned the corner, this time expecting the gorey sights and smells that awaited him; but he halted immediately when he saw three more of the damned things dragging themselves toward him from the other end of the hall, each of them decrepit in the same way as had been the first, hitching their way along in a triangular formation and moaning in staggered unison.

Jim glanced to his left and saw the original _thing_ already halfway down the hall, closing slowly in on him.

“Well, shit,” he muttered, and after a moment’s contemplation and a few steps backward, he opted to return the way he came. He snatched up a military-grade phaser rifle from one of the dead soldiers as he went, breezing past his shuffling companion uninterrupted on his way to the stairwell door. Its gaze followed him slowly as he crossed its path, and it pivoted as though living in slow motion, apparently solely interested in him.

He hit the butt of the rifle against the door handle, but the whole thing appeared to have been welded shut. He gave it a couple more strikes, but it was readily apparent that it wasn’t going to work, and he sighed his frustration as he turned again to face the creature. Its three friends appeared distantly at other the end of the corridor, and he calculated that he had about forty seconds before he needed to be seriously concerned about being cornered. 

“What do you want?” he asked, half the creature and half to himself. “Why do you keep coming for me?”

It only kept dragging itself on, mere seconds away from Jim’s position. Jim stepped deftly backward and kept a couple feet of space easily between them, leading the thing in a slow circle in front of the elevator bay doors. It gave him time to take a good, solid look at the creature in close proximity; and in the moments sunlight passed over its face, he realized that there was almost no doubt about it. 

This fucker was dead. Walking, and dead. 

And when it reached out to grab him while gnashing its teeth in a moment where Jim let it get just a touch too close, Jim finally figured out what the hell Bones had meant by “Don’t get bit.”

“I woke up in a goddamn zombie apocalypse,” he muttered to himself, tossing the rifle aside and reaching for his hand phaser, jacking the setting back to level 10. He pulled the trigger without another second’s hesitation; and the creature fell to the ground at his feet, the smell of burning flesh singing at Jim’s nostrils, the hole in its skull gaping as wide as its mouth.

Jim shook his head hard and snapped his body back toward the door, picking up the rifle as he went. He held the phaser close against the door and turned it up to its highest setting; slowly, a hole began to bore itself through the alloy. But it would take too much time to sear through medical-grade steel, more time than Jim had; the three other zombies -- _zombies??_ \-- were encroaching rapidly on his left, and he would have to take action.

Cursing to himself and without removing the phaser from the door, Jim held out the rifle in his left hand and, thumbing off the safety, took each of them out sequentially, no misses, his hands steady enough to surprise even him.

Jim stared at them a second too long after they hit the ground and watched their own pooling blood -- too dark and thick to be normal -- soak into their Starfleet uniforms. Two of them, he remarked, were cadets -- had been cadets -- and Jim’s stomach lurched again as he forced himself to focus on vaporizing the door.

He heard more distant clattering in his final moments in the corridor, but soon the hole was big enough for him to crawl through, and moments later he was fleeing down the stairs, taking care to leap over the stray limbs from the renewed array of corpses as he went. His feet fumbled over the stairs as he ran, his primary goal on getting the hell out of this death trap, both hands flying out to brace him on either side despite their respective grips on his weapons.

He had been on the fourteenth floor, and somewhere around the eighth the scorch marks had begun showing up on the walls. Jim looked at them curiously but refused to interrupt his escape to inquire into their source, but by the time he got to the third floor he discovered what had happened, anyway. He found himself staring through a sizeable hole in the wall out onto the clinic’s grounds, and finally he stopped long enough to realize that it had been a poorly-aimed explosive that had ripped the wall apart. The same explosion seemed to have completely obliterated an adjacent wing, and smoke smoldered on amidst blackened wreckage that looked to Jim to already have been days old, rained upon, crackling now under the force of the sun.

He paused long enough to scan his eyes over the end of a military-grade spacecraft sticking halfway out from what was left of the clinic’s wing, and registered that, while clearly crashed, it had also been incinerated -- intentionally, apparently separately, with no evidence of explosion on its outer hull. He realized then, suddenly, that he was looking at a warzone of more than one sort.

Jim spent another minute scanning his eyes over the scene in front of him, hardly daring to believe that Starfleet -- _his_ Starfleet -- had been reduced to this. Grounds usually lush and busy and lively now displayed death and abject destruction -- a perversion of the place he most readily called home. Now, he could not identify any evidence of life. 

_Where in the hell was everyone._

After several stunned moments spent staring out over the destroyed wing of the clinic, Jim descended the final flights of stairs -- made more difficult by the fact that half of them were ripped away by the explosion -- and leaped the final few steps directly out onto the grounds. His weak ankles collapsed out from under him, and he barely bit back a shout as he rolled out onto charred grass, allowing himself scant moments to lay sprawled on the ground while his blood pressure stabilized before propping himself delicately back to his feet.

The parking lot was a quarter of a mile away, and Jim wove his way between corpses with as much speed as he could muster, rifle held at the ready. More than once he caught movement out of the corner of his eye and looked to see prone bodies becoming mobile, moaning sickly, limbs protruding at impossible angles and insides becoming out. He checked the charge of his weapon and saw it was hovering at halfway; most of the walkers were too slow to catch up to him, in any case, so he focused on moving forward while he kept an eye out for any indication of lively humanity.

His feet hit pavement as he rounded the corner of the clinic wing, and then they dragged to a halt.

Prone forms were positioned intentionally in front of the proper entranceway to the clinic, covered with white sheets and organized according to some system Jim couldn’t initially identify. A quick scan across the grid told him there were at least 350 bodies in front of him, splayed like a warning to anyone approaching -- _we can’t help you here_.

There were too many bodies for anyone to deal with, so they were moved outside.

Jim glanced behind him and estimated thirty seconds before he had to keep moving again. Tentatively, he moved one sheet aside, then another, and then a third. Apart from bloating under the heat, all three bodies had in common the fact of having been shot through the head; and, Jim noted distantly, they were all human.

In fact, _everyone_ he’d seen had been human. Both the properly dead and the walkers had all been exclusively human. For all the diversity of persons he’d been able to identify as being affected by whatever event had happened here -- Starfleet, medical, military, pedestrian -- none of them had been from off-planet. And that struck Jim as extremely weird.

“What about this situation isn’t weird,” he thought to himself, palming his rifle and taking off again before another pair of creatures could reach out and take hold of him. The parking lot wasn’t far, just down the slope; but Jim took slightly more time, now, glancing behind him at the entrance to the clinic and the bodies arranged around it, noting for the first time the pair of dump trucks that were backed up on either side of it. Jim stumbled as he realized that what he’d seen was just another _load of bodies_ , waiting to be taken away somewhere, whose transport had been interrupted when -- when what? When the starship crashed into the hospital wing?

Yeah, he thought faintly. That was probably it.

Jim did his level best to keep his eyes focused as he forced himself to look forward.

The parking lot was packed with vehicles of all sorts, crammed in at all angles, some with doors left open in panic, others in destruction. Decomposing bodies leaned out of doors and windows, stretched out along the pavement, with missing limbs, collapsed skulls, mouths left gaping in horror. Jim made quick work of two walkers who were browsing their way through the vehicles as he snagged his eyes upon a newer hybrid ground-based vehicle whose fuel cells would surely last him at least as long as he needed to get out of the city, if needed.

In actuality, all he needed was to get to the Shipyard shuttlebay. Surely they were evacuating the living from there.

He hefted the rotting corpse out of the vehicle and onto the ground, deftly stepping over it and shutting the door with flourish. Jim narrowly resisting the urge to rest his head against the steering wheel, instead locking the door to prevent the entry of unwanted attackers. But as he looked up to give one final glance to the clinic in front of him, his eyes snagged on the marquee hanging over the entrance to the clinic’s grounds, still running off some reserve power somewhere. It was reprogrammed from its usual updates about emergency room waiting times to flash hurriedly in block letters:

QUARANTINE PROTOCOL  
EFFECTIVE 2259.157  
CLINIC OVERRUN & CLEARED  
DO NOT APPROACH

Jim’s chest tightened. He watched the marquee scroll through several times, unblinking.

He had no idea what day it was, but it didn’t matter. The shuttlebay was not an option.

Staring straight ahead and ignoring the pounding of walkers on the hull of the vehicle, Jim’s eyes wandered as he tried to think of the next step. Quarantine Protocol had never been very well-defined, brought up only in vague terms by admirals and other bureaucrats whenever an internal threat to Earth’s population had manifested. The Federation had massive texts mandating Quarantine Protocol, Jim knew that much; but their contents were classified, even to captains. As far as Jim had been able to tell, it had been primarily thought up in order to keep Earth isolated from other planets in the event of conflicts and pandemics to prevent their spread, and he knew enough about it to know that both shuttlebays and shipyards had been programmed to self-destruct within minutes of the declaration of Quarantine Protocol. 

Jim knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the Protocol hadn’t been successfully implemented if his surroundings had been destroyed to this extent without the arrival of assistance.

He bit his lip and thought. Briefly, he considered setting out for Starfleet HQ, but he strongly suspected -- given the destruction of the clinic -- that HQ had not fared better. In the event of whatever this was, Starfleet would’ve held on as long as possible, and if Quarantine Protocol had been implemented -- well. It seemed likely to Jim that it wasn’t standing at all anymore.

By now there were seven walkers crawling ineffectually over his vehicle, and though he felt himself to be in no immediate danger given their failure to strategize, there were about a dozen more crawling over the grounds toward him. Jim realized with a jolt that he was still in San Francisco -- among the most populous metropolitan areas in the most populous state in the country. If these zombies were former people, then his best bet would be to get away from them -- to get away from civilization. He additionally realized that anyone with any sense who might’ve been still alive had likely done the same.

Jim swallowed heavily, ran his hands tiredly over his face, and wasted no time in hot-wiring the vehicle, suddenly thankful for his youthful history of delinquency. Throwing an arm over the head of the passenger seat, Jim threw the vehicle in gear, reversed deftly over two walkers climbing over the trunk, and peeled away from Starfleet in the direction of the I-80 as quickly as he could.

\-----

He’d driven for over an hour when he pulled over to the side of the road.

Jim sat, for a moment, knuckles curling white around the steering wheel, feeling his blood pump hard through his veins. Slowly, he turned his head to set his gaze upon the hills to the south, where warm, orange pre-dusk light lit the trees with a peaceful elegance that harshly contrasted the new reality he’d had to internalize.

The sounds of debris cracking under the wheels resonated in his ears; the engine purred on. A glance at the car’s display told him he had maybe an hour of fuel left.

He stared out at the empty road, deserted in spite of his proximity to Sacramento. Since he’d left the Bay Area, he’d been haunted by its emptiness. He’d hoped to find some evidence of camps outside the city, evidence of lasting human life, but instead it had only been desolation for miles -- no vehicles, no people, not even any walkers; no evidence of anything at all. Towns had housed only ghosts -- evidence of persons who’d been around within days, but who were present no longer. Here there had been walkers, staggering weakly toward him without Jim registering any major threat even in the brief interlude when he’d stepped out of the vehicle; but soon they appeared in greater numbers, emerging from homes and businesses whose integrity had been badly compromised either by erstwhile looters or by their own penchant for destruction.

Jim had opted to keep moving rather than to risk his life to search for survivors; but the impulse had badly haunted him as he’d approached Sacramento. This city, too, had been impossibly quiet at first, dead littering the sides of the highway just as liberally as they had in San Francisco -- just as they had in all the other cities he’d passed through on his way through -- and he wondered how he’d find anyone who was indeed still alive in town. He thought where he’d be if he was trying to keep loved ones safe with the knowledge that no one was coming for them for a while -- hiding in cellars, maybe, or otherwise trying to make it through by hiding or escaping. He considered pausing for a look around; but the walkers had emerged quickly and in great numbers, apparently drawn to the sound of his vehicle, and despite the scream of his conscience, Jim opted to push through.

Downtown had been horrific. A mob of half-alive figures had staggered out from all corners, many of whom had stood in the middle of the interstate, trying to block his path by sheer force of number. Jim realized dimly that they were, actually, strategizing -- working together to get a shot at forcing Jim’s vehicle to a halt with the use of themselves. 

Jim had clenched the steering wheel, shifted gears, and punched his way through. Arms had slapped sickly against the flanks of the car as he’d shot down the interstate, entire bodies crunching beneath the wheels of the car, the lack of strength of the zombies evident by the near-complete lack of resistance they offered when met with the force of the bumper. Jim felt his stomach churning with the sounds, so he did his best to hit as few figures as he could, swerving too to avoid the butts of cars that had tried to make their way onto the road and were now parked on sidewalks and sidestreets showing signs of destruction and fire.

There had been too many walkers to get a proper count on, but Jim had estimated there’d been over two hundred of them just within his line of sight.

He’d taken note of the way they’d snapped at him, some moving more slowly than others; and he’d thought they were probably running out of food. _People,_ he’d scolded himself, feeling nauseous. _People. There weren’t any people there._ The sentence finished itself automatically in his mind -- _... left to eat_ \-- and Jim suddenly felt strangely glad with the thought that the Quarantine Protocol might’ve been successful. It was designed to stop the spread of inexplicable, ghastly disasters like this one. He hoped other planets wouldn’t have to suffer this fate.

He hoped no one else would ever have to suffer this fate.

Relief had flooded him when the deserted openness of the highway greeted him again, buildings falling into the distance behind him. All of a sudden, after an hour of hoping for any movement, any indication that some people had survived this, he preferred the isolation.

And isolation there was. The interstate opened up ahead, wending its way slowly into the hills. There was nothing before him; it appeared a blank slate. There was no one. This fucking road was the only beacon of civilization cutting through the goddamned California mountains, and _civilization wasn’t here._

He hadn’t needed to pull over. He could have just stopped dead in the middle of the road -- in the middle of the goddamned I-80 -- and no one would have cared.

There was no one _left_ to care.

There was _no one else left fucking alive._

He calmly opened the driver’s side door, walked a few steps out of the vehicle, and emptied the contents of his stomach out onto the center line.

\-----

Once he had a grip on himself, Jim reached inside the vehicle and popped the trunk. 

He’d hoped to find fuel; the indicator light had started flashing in earnest, and Jim didn’t know how long it’d be before he found another vehicle to try to siphon fuel from. Instead he found only a suitcase and a backpack, the former packed with changes of clothes. He remembered the size of the corpse he’d tossed out onto the pavement an hour earlier and thought it had probably been female; but there were men’s clothes here, too, thrown in haphazardly alongside memorabilia. Jim pulled out a photo showing a smiling couple, his hands gripping affectionately at her elbows around hers, the two of them looking over the edge of a boat in early autumn, jackets taught against them with the force of the wind. Jim reflected that she’d probably been at the clinic trying to get her husband out of there before shit got too real -- only it had been too late after all, only he’d probably been already dead, only she had gotten killed for her effort.

Jim tossed the photo aside and grimly refocused. He pulled a pair of pants out from within the bag, unfurled them into the afternoon air. They were a bit long and would surely fit a bit loosely around his illness-thinned hips, but he thought they were as close as he was about to get.

He changed quickly, standing in the middle of the road, feeling the reality of the desolation settle around him, choosing a t-shirt at random. Then he opened the backpack to find more food, to his relief and joy -- some of it was spoiled but most of it was non-perishable, cans of fruit and beans that would last him several days if rationed properly. He also located three bottles of water at the bottom and drained half of one easily to get the taste of sick out of his mouth, again regretting his hastiness when the heavy weight of too much water settled into his gut.

Jim yanked his pillowcase out from the passenger side of the vehicle and threw the remainder of his food into the backpack instead. He offered a silent thanks to the deceased owner of the vehicle for her thoughtfulness, for her preparedness, for her unintentional assistance in Jim’s survival. Then he climbed back into the vehicle and allowed himself five minutes to eat, to breathe, to get his wits about him before carrying on.

Someone, somewhere, must be alive, he reasoned. He’d survived -- and he’d been _unconscious_. All he had to do was find them.

Recklessly, he pushed the vehicle to its upper speed limits. The sun shot angrily into his eyes by way of the rear view mirror. He estimated he had two hours before darkness would start to fall.

Another thing he had no fucking idea how to deal with.

He pounded at the radio and flipped through the channels. Static. Static. More static. He chose his favourite of the options and settled into the white noise. It was better than silence.

\-----

Finally, Jim found all the other vehicles. 

They were stuck just outside Truckee, bumper-to-bumper, trying to get to Reno just the same as he was but stalled by some invisible obstacle ahead. Jim glanced at the struggling fuel gage and disengaged the vehicle’s engine, realizing there was no chance he was going to be able to drive through this anyway. He grabbed the backpack and weapons from the passenger seat and stepped out of the car. He estimated he had enough sunlight left to walk for half an hour before he’d need to figure out something for the night.

Jim kept his rifle at the ready, creeping his way forward between the vehicles, hitching his weapon up instinctively at every face he saw. Many bodies remained in their cars, with seatbelts still on; Jim wondered how quickly they must have died once they pulled up to the traffic jam, with the frequency of seated bodies increasing the closer he got to the front of the line. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck twitch with the realization that walkers could still easily be hidden around here; but the cars closer to his own were empty, and he thought that those who’d pulled up more recently had likely had time to successfully start their way forward on foot, as he was -- without interruption.

“In the event of a zombie apocalypse,” he muttered to himself, trying to soothe his heart rate with the sound of his own voice, “evacuate the nation’s most populous state immediately. Do not clog up the city streets. You may find that your access to the nearest state line is blocked, however, by everyone else in California having the same idea. Do not panic. Your death will come to you soon enough.” Jim felt faintly impressed that the chaos hadn’t been more total before now, actually -- _really? was he actually thinking that right now?_ \-- and wondered if some guidance had been offered by some still-operational organizations at the outset of the disaster.

Jim went forward far enough to realize that the jam extended for several miles up the interstate, and that he was unlikely to make it to the end before dark. He stood in poised contemplation for a moment before opting to return the way he came, preferring the road he knew was empty to whatever might lie ahead until he had a chance to go in with the advantage of daylight.

Softening somewhat on his retreat, Jim’s eyes were left to wander over the vehicles packing the road. Many were stained with blood, and Jim noted the bodies of what appeared to have been walkers half-slid under vehicles in the other lanes of the interstate. He bent to examine one, tentatively, and saw the telltale hole through the head that suggested an intentional kill.

Suddenly Jim’s senses lit up as he realized that someone had been alive here, and recently by the looks of things -- the blood was not quite dry on the asphalt, and the sun had been burning brightly enough for the last several hours that he thought it surely should have been.

He stood, too quickly, dizziness briefly overtaking him, forcing his own steadying hand to fly to his forehead. Briefly, he shut his eyes; but soon opened them again and set his stance, keen not to be caught off-guard. He raised his weapon again and took a look around the surrounding area -- and finally his eye caught on a white car with the message painted on its driver’s side door in what appeared to be blood:

SULU  
TWO +  
DAYS

Jim’s stomach flipped, and he felt a naive burst of hope flood his system for the first time since he’d awoken.

He knew Hikaru wasn’t the only Sulu on the planet. He did. But he couldn’t help but consider the possibility, however remote, that someone from the Enterprise had survived. If anyone was going to make it out of this din ... well. It was naive to believe that anyone Jim knew was left. But he did feel, distantly, that his crew was likelier than most to make it out alive.

The message was ominous as all hell being painted in blood like that, but he did have to grant that blood was the most readily available substance. It was mostly dried and had the same darker quality he’d seen coming out of the walkers, and Jim was relieved whomever this was had had the good sense not to use their own blood.

He stared at the message as he tried to decipher what it was trying to convey. He appreciated its vagueness. If there had been some military attempt to subdue whatever cataclysm had occurred, nonspecificity was crucial. He decided that Sulu -- whomever that may be -- had passed by here and was leaving a marker indicating his progress. It had taken him a little over two days to get here from wherever he’d started. Jim wondered if he’d missed previous markers along the way, if ‘Sulu’ had been tracking his -- _or her, damnit, whoever_ \-- progress all the way from San Francisco.

Jim considered the message in conjunction with the evidence of live activity around him, and reasoned that this Sulu might still be around; he ( _or whoever_ , goddamnit, Jim) would need somewhere to crash for the night, too, after all.

Jim wandered a bit uselessly between the vehicles, looking for other signs of life only to come up short. He quickly figured out that no one would squat here, along the main roadway where there was very little opportunity for a clean break -- especially given the patches of potentially protective woods expanding out in the hills on his left.

The sun was giving an ominous glow to its rays, and Jim hitched his rifle suddenly ahead as he heard a moaning in the distance. Had he imagined it? He looked around again at the dead filling the vehicles, splain across the ground, and considered the food in his pack. He could lock himself in a car and hope for the best, or he could venture out into the woods for the evening and give himself the opportunity for endless escape on foot if things got hairy.

Jim gave a final sweep with his rifle and made a decision. Slowly, he backed his way off the road, turned his back, and half-jogged his way into the woods.

\-----

In amidst the trees, Jim felt almost normal.

The sun was beginning its earnest descent now, streaming between the tree branches with a pleasant orange glow. Jim had put his phaser rifle away in favour of the hand phaser, feeling the tension in his shoulders from the effort of holding up the larger weapon; and even then his arm was at his side as he focused on moving as soundlessly as possible through the woods. Fatigue was beginning to set into his limbs, and Jim chewed slowly on almonds from his pack as he settled into a more sustainable hiking pace.

There was little sign of life as yet; but in only fifteen minutes of walking, he'd passed two dead walkers, slumped against trees, each with what looked like blunt force trauma to the head. There was no way for Jim to tell how long they'd been sitting there, with the half-undergone process of decomposition already underway with most walkers; but after brief moments of examination he noticed splatters of dark, half-coagulated blood still in liquid form around them; and that was enough evidence for Jim to keep believing someone was left alive in the woods. He considered calling out as he made his way through the trees; but the almonds were additionally drying out his already-parched throat, and he opted instead for silence.

Jim stopped and crouched in a semi-open clearing, reaching into his pack for water -- but his head snapped up immediately as he registered the distant _crack_ of branches snapping underfoot. It had come from up the slope, to his right; and Jim stared at the spot in spite of the pounding of his head, hoping to hear it again. Instead, he heard a flitting whistle -- a noise he was certain was human. 

He hitched his phaser up and found he needed his left hand to steady his right as he crept toward the noise. "Hello?" he croaked, and immediately cleared his throat to keep from coughing. "Is someone there?"

A pause, and then another whistle, higher and more whittling than the first; much more distantly, a third whistle in reply.

"Hello?" His voice was reduced to a hoarse whisper, to his own chagrin. He paused; he heard the distant brush of motion. "Are you there … ?"

At last the figure stepped out from behind a cluster of trees. Jim hitched his phaser higher and hacked quietly against the dryness of his throat as he tracked the movements of the figure with his eyes, with his weapon. The steps were cautious, trained, and definitely the motions of someone who was alive -- at least for now. Jim twice opened his mouth before managing words. "Stop, stop moving,” he choked out harshly. “I'm alive and uninjured, I'd like to talk--"

The figure slowed, hands clutching around what Jim identified faintly as an old-world handgun; and suddenly a face flooded with light as it stepped into a remaining patch of sunlight. Jim’s hands clutched tighter around his weapon as he continued to hold it at the ready; but his face reflected pained and incredulous recognition as he took in the sight standing in front of him. "Jim?"

Disbelief flooded Jim's limbs as he registered the form in front of him.

It was Bones.


End file.
